Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics: the selected works of Ivor F. Goodson
Long Waves of Educational Reform
The troubled period at Sheldon, and the fight for survival at Durant, show how a standards-based and standardizing reform initiative has marked a severe new conjuncture for the schools in question. In both cases, the sense of mission and meaning has been severely depleted, and morale and motivation undermined. In the new conjuncture, teachers’ hearts and minds are moving away from their schoolwork and the search for meaning and mission is moving elsewhere, most commonly into the personal domain. As one teacher summarized his withdrawal, “I can’t deal with the system it has absolutely torn me apart and I’m tired of fighting it.”
This disillusionment can be read against the growing demographic change in Bradford. From a young vigorous innovative teaching cohort in the conjuncture of the 60’s and 70’s, Bradford’s teaching force is aging, with a third of the teachers expecting to retire in the next five years. Likewise, patterns of leadership have been transformed, from the period of charismatic and heroic principals in the 60’s and 70’s, to a period of ‘faceless managers’ who move flexibly from post to post in the late 1990s.
In Ontario, the new conjuncture of change can be clearly marked with the election of the Progressive Conservative Government in 1995. The policies proved to be deeply conservative and profoundly unprogressive. Honesty would require its renaming as the ‘Regressive’ Conservative Government, for the era initiated massive cuts in educational spending, alongside a new regime of curriculum and assessment reforms. Gidney has judged that, from 1995, the next five years were the most extensive and extended period of reform ever seen in Ontario. In the period 1995-2000, more legislation was passed on education than in the whole of the provinces preceding history (Gidney 1999). Gidney’s historical overview alerts us to the truly epoch-making nature of the Harris Government. This was a starkly marked conjuncture of change: the new curriculum and assessment reforms were centrally designed, new testing regimes were instigated, and report cards and computerized reporting introduced.
The teachers’ response to the blitzkrieg of reforms was to go for early retirement in unprecedented numbers – demoralization among teaches was rife. In fact, this flocking towards early retirement was exacerbated by the demographic profile of the teaching force. An aging teaching force reacted to a flurry of reforms at the later stages of their careers by deciding to leave rather than undergo such drastic professional surgery. If this was the case with classroom teachers, it was a similar pattern with school principals. They too chose early retirement in large numbers and the resulting instability was compounded by school district policies which insisted on rotating principals between schools.
